People using Venmo to spy on cheating spouses | Hacker News Reader

People using Venmo to spy on cheating spouses

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When I first created a Venmo account, I was shocked to see users' payments flowing through my feed and immediately found a way to make my payments private.

But I could never find a way to effectively unlink the social media account (FB) that I had used to find my first friend/payee. I think I unlinked the account, but I still see payments from all the people that Venmo made me follow as a result of linking the now-unlinked FB account.

I haven't used the app in a long time, and I wonder if this mass-unfollow feature has been added. I know they think that people open Venmo to check their feed, but some people find the public feed creepy, and it makes me use the app less in favor of alternatives.

I recently went through and unfollowed 100+ people because there's still no mass-unfollow feature :(

I had no idea you could make your payments “private” by default. Indeed you can, and you can mark all past payments as private by going (on iOS) to:

  Settings -> Privacy -> Private

and

  Settings -> Privacy -> Past Transactions -> Change All to Private

I always had feared I’d forget to set my transactions as private.

I was also shocked, and immediately set it to private. I registered using an email address (as I do for practically every online service I use) so I don't have to deal with the Facebook dimension.

However, for the handful of people I regularly send money to, I can see all of their transactions on the home screen, including business fees (which reveals the freelance rates they charge), family loans, etc. I take it they have not limited their transactions to "private".

Regardless, I am amazed that Venmo/PayPal thought sharing payment activity would be a good idea.

If it is not private it's a valid thing to use for ad targeting.

I'm utterly perplexed that Venmo is even a thing.

When I first started hearing about it maybe 5-6 years ago, I just figured, I already have PayPal and Square Cash, I'm too old, nobody I know uses Venmo, why bother.

I've mostly ignored that it existed except occasionally hearing (usually younger) folks talking about it.

A couple of months ago I was telling some people at work that I'm too old for it, and Square Cash works well enough for me, and commented that I can't see how a newcomer could be any easier than just having the money go directly into my bank account.

When a coworker informed me that Venmo payments stay in your account, my exasperated reply was "wait, it's WORSE than Square Cash? It's like going back to PayPal?" Well, you can imagine how incredulous I was when I found out that Venmo IS PayPal, just with different branding.

For the past 5 years I've been assuming Venmo is something new and cool that "the kids" are using, but I'm too out of touch to bother, and suddenly I find out it's a rebranding of PayPal with all of the drawbacks of it. It blows my mind that something caught traction that is functionally worse than the competitor of the product it's a rebranding of!

Well it's PayPal without the fees.

"Friends and Family" payments are also without fees.

I can't think of any fees I've ever paid to PayPal other than for eBay transactions and the like -- though it's of course possible Venmo has different rate structures and thresholds.

Is it?

My understanding is that (other than the brand and parent ownership) as services they're quite different.

Maybe from a UI standpoint, but all of the competitors are pretty similar. Minus network effect, of course. Nobody in my network uses Venmo, for example, but apparently I'm an outlier.

With all of them, you can find a way to use it for free. Eg, if the service you use doesn't support free bank transfers, you link it with a debit card for free transfers.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/paypal-vs-google-wallet...

> Venmo IS PayPal, just with different branding

They were a startup in 2010 but got bought by PayPal in 2013.

I imagine my feelings about Venmo reflect a lot of peoples':

Basically it was the first way to send money on mobile phones that wasn't miserable or charged fees so everyone started using it. By the time PayPal owned it it was already popular.

Everyone wanted to easily send money for at least, like, 10 years before that. It was the first mainstream option and it still felt really late. (PayPal already existed but was... disliked. I think because of lots of horror stories about customer service, and maybe not having a convenient app interface, or requiring a bank account connection?)

The competitors are all equivalent now (FB, Google, whatever), but I would never embrace using a FB or Google product exclusively so Venmo feels like a 'neutral third-party option' , at least to an extent, which we can use as the 'default' payments app.

The Bank's versions (Zelle, etc) are way too coupled to banks and too big-corporation to be excited about.

If there was, say, a startup that did exactly the same thing as Venmo but wasn't affiliated with a big company (PayPal), I think everyone would happily use it. If it was, like, a B-corp or non-profit that gives proceeds to charity, I think everyone would jump ship instantly.

Basically I don't care at all about Venmo's social features, I just want to send money and prefer not to support a big corporation or give more data to FB or Google. I bet lots of people are of similar mind.

So Square Cash then?

At this point there are too many network effects around venmo, if you're splitting the BBQ with 5 people and 4 have venmo and you don't, it's not as convenient for the requester. That's why I got venmo initially, and now it's super easy to request money from friends and 2nd degree friends, since my network is all venmo. I know 1 person who uses square cash and he's over 40, and I know 2 or 3 less tech-literate friends who use paypal and refuse to try venmo. It's just a hassle to split costs with them because I have to do it in 2 apps instead of adding everyone to the same request in venmo.

I feel like I'm missing something here.

If I go out somewhere with a bunch of friends, we just ask for separate checks.

Works well unless:

- the restaurant doesn't do separate checks for large groups - friends ordered meals with significant variance in case, and the server wasn't initially told to keep items separated - you want to split communal items in an arbitrary fashion

Me too. This is not a problem I've ever encountered.

I think "splitting the BBQ" as in someone is buying and cooking a bunch of food and their friends are helping with the cost.

But anyway, some restaurants don't split checks and most don't like to because it's extra work for their staff.

How does PayPal fail this use case? Or cash (the horror)?

People don't carry cash as much as they used to, because they don't need to, because apps can do it.

My friends and I largely don't carry cash, and even though I typically carry a single 20 and a 100 dollar bill for emergencies, it's hard to split cash unless someone else can give you change, which requires them to carry a bunch of 5s 10s 1s (coins?).

Paypal fails like I said because of network effects. More people in my friend group have venmo than paypal (even though paypal owns both), so when it's time to pay, venmo is the default.

Nothing is inherently wrong with paypal, it's just that nobody in my group uses it. So, just plain old network effects.

We used to do that, but splitting with an app is easier so we've gradually stopped. Especially because many restaurants don't like doing separate checks, or have a limit to how much they will split, or it just feels mean and inordinately complicated to ask the waiter to do it when we have a way to sort it out ourselves.

Yep, it’s network effects. All my friends were impressed by Square Cash’s ability to instantly transfer to their bank accounts for a small fee, but nobody wants to install another cash app (and another virtual wallet) to use with just one friend.

When Apple Pay Cash came out, I was sure that it would replace Venmo, but even after all my friends updated to iOS 11 they continued to use Venmo. I’m guessing this has something to do with Apple Pay Cash not having any way to keep track of pending payments and requests, meaning your friend will probably never pay you back for lunch if the request isn’t paid as soon as it’s sent, before getting buried in history by conversation (iOS-only is another network-effect factor, but my social group is pretty much exclusively iOS).

I still don't get it. My bank's app lets me send money to people via interac e-transfer. It's kind of a pain in the ass to add a new payee each time, but the payee doesn't need to have any app themselves. It works through email and the bank's website. It's free too. What does venmo have that isn't covered by that?

I don't know where you live, but most banks in the US don't have that, and if they do, the UI and messaging is often terrible.

In fact Venmo's popularity, in my mind, is directly related to US banks finally making a push for free user-to-user transfers (even if their apps still need massive work).

> I still don't get it. My bank's app lets me send money to people via interac e-transfer.

You don't get it that most banks do not do that? I am unsure why you are confused about that?

Every bank in Canada does it, even the tiny credit unions. It's common throughout Europe. I don't know about Australia, but they probably have it too. I don't know, just another example of Americans being backwards and thinking everyone else has the same problems. I seriously can't believe it's 2018 and this isn't mandatory for every bank yet.

Australia just got PayId this year which means you can send any amount of money to anybody who signs up via their banks and receive money in seconds.

Until last year you had to wait up to 3 days to do an interbank transfer but not anymore. (same bank transfer would usually clear within the day)

I have used it quite a bit since it was released and I have to say that it does the job. The only downside is that it is tied to your phone number and I am not really sure what the process is if you want to change it.

Perhaps it's the people's problem for not demanding a better system.

Many other countries in the world bank transfers are easy and free (within the country). I can transfer to anyone from my phone, and do all the time. No apps or special services needed.

IMHO America likes to hinge these arguments on "our system is too old, we're just too big, etc.", but when it comes down to it are just excuses to allow banks to continue fleecing their customers.

> It’s kind of a pain in the ass to add a new payer each time

This is one reason Venmo is successful. Paying someone is easy. Receiving money is easy. No one wants to spend 5 minutes setting up a payee on their phone when they’re splitting a dinner bill.

I use it for the fact that it's popular, of course. Worse than the fact that your balance stays in Venmo is that if you make a transaction larger than your balance, it gets paid exclusively from your bank account and doesn't clear out your balance first.

Moreover, Venmo is garbage at the simplest thing of letting me find the person I'm paying. The only way to distinguish between all the many people of the same name (profile pictures being far too small to see in the selection list) is to have the person actually tell you their exact ID. The fact that I have previously done transactions with them or that they are a once-removed transaction friend from me isn't displayed.

Every generation throws their own hero up the pop charts.

It boggles my mind that anyone would want to stream their payment history publicly.

I agree. This makes me feel old now, and I'm in my early 30s. My wife has access to all my financial information, but I can't imagine sharing it publicly!

Especially when “the wrong word could get you in trouble”:

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_571f8057e4b01a5ebde34b97/...

It is so ridiculous that the comment for a payment would be used against someone. Writing jokes in the 'for' line on a check is a time honored tradition when paying your friends money. I don't want to live in a world where I am not allowed to make jokes because it might get me a visit from the FBI.

Making jokes in private is fine. But publicly declaring an intent to violate the law is a joke that is going to get attention from law-enforcement unless they can be convinced it's a joke.

Guilty until proven funny?

Which is exactly why random bullshit payments shouldn't be public, and why Venmo defaulting to it (or even having it be an option) makes no sense.

Quite relevant: "Caution on Twitter urged as tourists barred from US."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312

The very point in question is about whether this information is public.

"Cuba" is not declaring intent to violate the law, and investigating such a case seems like a poor use of law enforcement resources, since a) there are many legal transactions describable as "Cuba", and b) it depends on the violators being overt about their lawbreaking.

The payer could very well be referring to drinks at the Cuba Libre bar, or tickets for the Cuba Gooding Jr. movie/show.

I used to write vulgar stuff in the memo line like “hookers” or “blow”. Stupid college shit. One day my bank called me and said if I did it again they’d cancel my account. I asked the rep her name and promised to stop...

I wrote “fuck you sarah” for two years until I changed banks.

Sarah got punished twice there. First, being the one who had to make this unpleasant phone call, and then being the target of these notes.

I think calling people was probably part of her job.

As noted below it wasn’t a company policy she didn’t personally like seeing things like “emergency eunuch surgery” on checks.

She said she would make it a policy. All bark, no bite.

What an odd thing for a bank to do, police how someone uses a memo line in a check. At least you got your revenge on them.

It's my understanding that Venmo will flag transactions with certain words in the memo.

"I Tried to Venmo $12.66 for 'ISIS' and the Government Was Pissed

It turns out the Treasury Department doesn't appreciate my sense of humor."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gqyzd/i-tried-to-venmo-1...

Ironic given how Softcard used to be called Isis.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had to file a suspicious activity report for every one of those checks.

Sounds like you never grew out of "stupid college shit". I feel sorry for Sarah and anyone else on the receiving end of this type of behavior.

You should have used her manager's name instead.

I asked her if it was company policy and she said no, she just didn’t like it personally and would see it was made a policy.

It was a small town Christian credit union account my parents set up for me in high school to start building credit.

So fuck Sarah.

Wow, you really showed her.

Why is it important to put jokes there? I view a check as a pseudo-legal document. Do you slip jokes into the contracts you sign?

I draw smiley faces on the signature line at stores and restaurants pretty often.

A long time ago, checks had to be deposited at a bank counter, in person. If I wanted to embarrass my payee, I'd write something risque or vulgar in the memo line. That way they would have to suffer that embarrassment if they wanted my money.

Yeah, it's juvenile. I don't understand why the FBI would care though. There's a 0% chance that a real terrorist is writing "ISIS" on their checks to fund terror.

I would agree, I don't really understand the logic in this thread. You're literally giving the check to a bank who is then going to have read it and look at what it's for and who you're sending the money too - and part of their job is to decide if it is legitimate, or if they should ask you about it, etc. If you put something extremely suspicious or flat-out illegal in the memo line, I would presume they're obligated to at least report it, or else they could be on the hook if it turns out it was actually true and they let it go with no questions asked.

Too late, you already live in that world.

I don't want to live in that kind of world either, but it goes on existing around me all the same.

A friend in college got a fun letter from the Comptroller of the Currency after writing “A Night in Tehran” on a reimbursement for Iranian food in Chicago.

Did that happen to be the name of the restaurant?

Apparently people -- even the so called "Smart ones" at Harvard -- just submit their private, personal info.

> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

> Zuck: Just ask.

> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Source: Mark Zuckerberg Called People Who Handed Over Their Data "Dumb F_cks" => https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...

In Facebook’s early days, everything you put on the site was shared with your friends. So it was not “private, personal, info” but rather the opposite — information that users wanted to publicize widely. I have never put anything on Facebook that I care whether Mark Zuckerberg reads or not. It would be weird and creepy, for sure, if he was looking at pictures of my baby, but I willingly shared those with over a thousand people so am happy to share with one more.

> So it was not “private, personal, info” but rather the opposite — information that users wanted to publicize widely

SSN is not private, personal info?

I've never met anyone online or offline who wanted to publicize their SSN widely. Oh wait... that LifeLock dude.... https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/

SNS, not SSNs.

SNS almost certainly refers to either:

1) Student numbers

2) Screen names (like for AIM)

SNS is meant to mean SN's, or "screennames". This (now-outdated) term refers to messenger accounts (AIM/ICQ) in the pre-Facebook world.

This isn't meant to call you out specifically but I've seen others echo similar sentiments of "I only put what I want on FB so it's no big deal privacy wise".

What's troubling about FB is the _other_ implicit information they (and the other large social apps) passively collect about you. Unless you're using a particularly effective ad/privacy blocker you're also sharing all the data about every site you've visited that has a FB like button. Also, separate from you and your data, FB has a tremendous graph of all the contacts, etc who have you as a contact.

Collectively, this gives them a much greater reach and ability to make inferences than just what you directly share.

> shared with your friends.

The quoted conversation is about Zuck volunteering to share information to someone who is NOT their friends.

This is being downvoted likely because "Mark was a kid", but in many ways he was right. A priori, there is no reason to trust any website or company on the internet.

The fact that people trust Google with intimate search queries, or trust Facebook with their personal photos and info, or trust Apple with their messages, or trust a website like Amazon in shopping is really amazing. They are all private companies that are, strictly speaking, beholden only to their shareholders. And for whatever reason, people either forget that or erroneously believe there is legislation governing their behavior.

> downvoted likely because "Mark was a kid"

well, it's often used as a lazy sort of character assassination.

it's also (perhaps ironically) a good example of why "right to be forgotten" can make sense.

The 15-year apology tour and various dark patterns that Facebook employs certainly suggest that if "dumb fucks" was a youthful error Zuckerberg has done nothing to change. If he learned and course-corrected the company, then your criticism would be fair; that hasn't happened, so the comment is still relevant today.

I don't see these citations as "lazy character assassination"; rather, "this is who he is, he laid the cards bare more than a decade ago"

Can't reply to TAForObvReasons directly due to thread limits but, you're right on - actually just about anyone in this game sits in the same boat. MZ was the only one that admitted it.

> it's also (perhaps ironically) a good example of why "right to be forgotten" can make sense.

Or, perhaps ironically, a good example of why "right to be forgotten" does not make sense.

He was a kid, but lol, damn kids are honest. Yes all people are dumb fucks. That's like straight up impossible to challenge that claim too.

(s/Harward/world/g) and (s/4000/2B/g) and you'd get the recent Zuck's Congress testimony.

I dont know why people even defend MZ, with arguments like, "he was young" -- he still is young. "People grow and mature" -- yup not seeing it. "People change" -- also dont see it. In fact, the MZ of today is just as creepy (if not more) than sketchy Mark 'Dumb Fucks" Zuckerberg.

Typically, the only defenders of MZ are FB employees. I guess they indoctrinate their employees to their Godhead well!

This breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's especially true in this case. When a discussion has been repeated so many times, it becomes off topic on a site where the core value is intellectual curiosity.

Indeed.

My guess behind the attraction to such a service would be that a public spending feed could make one more conservative for fear of judgement.

Although if its solely for bill-splitting I have no idea why it is public. Surely people's spending history has some value en-masse, why make that public?

I interviewed at PayPal in 2012, and one of the engineering managers there mentioned the concept of social mobile payments- imagine you pay for a beer at a bar, and it shows up in your feed. I was utterly unconvinced by the idea. It felt cargo cult, adding social for the sake of it. A few years later, Venmo goes big among millennials, and later on PayPal buys them. Go figure.

Hmm, I think most people use it to pay friends back for brunch or drinks. It's not like you're streaming all your credit card purchases. It's kinda like checking in on Foursquare with friends... it's a public way to expose your social graph a bit.

It may not be for you, but people love social media. To put it a different way: it's so successful because, despite there being lots of ways to pay back friends, none of the other ones let you subtly brag that you're out having fun.

Ugh.

> It may not be for you, but people love social media

People also love heroin and alcohol and tobacco. People love lots of things that are terrible for them.

People also love exercise, healthy food, and sleep.

I don't think payments is something that is social worthy, but comparing them to chemically-addicting substances is a little absurd.

That people like something doesn't mean it's good for them, or even makes them happy: anything that some people really like and that is undoubtedly harmful can serve to prove that point. It doesn't put social media and heroin "in the same ballpark", it doesn't even say social media is harmful, it just says the fact that some people like it isn't saying a lot in itself. (I might add, especially not when it comes in the form of "you don't love it but people love it".)

If you think letting your friends know you just had brunch is on par with heroin or alcohol... well, damn. I think social media can be unhealthy, and I think the pendulum is beginning to swing back the other way, but I support exploring new ways to communicate with the people around you.

>it's so successful because, despite there being lots of ways to pay back friends

It was far and away the simplest and easiest way to quickly transfer money electronically, at least around ~6 years ago. The "big players" that have payment apps either weren't launched or were just getting started, and PayPal just had/has this bizarre level of BS required for a process that should just take like 2 or 3 simple steps.

Nowadays I have friends that occasionally put amusing messages and stuff in their payments, but I don't really get the feeling that people are actually showing off much. Most of the payments I see are between SOs or roommates splitting utilities+rent and such. There are probably plenty of people who do enjoy this part of the app, but Venmo just seems like a great product regardless, so I don't know how key it actually is.

I've been told Venmo works exactly like PayPal, which is to say it's a 2 step process to get money from your Venmo account into your actual checking/savings account. So that would make it just as usable as the, what, 20-year-old PayPal, and worse than Square Cash. Am I misinformed?

When I started using Venmo, PayPal was cumbersome to use (I don't even know if it had decent mobile app 6 years ago) and tended to have additional costs. Also the UI pummeled you with all sorts of random information and options, when all anyone wants to do is send $x to y-person as fast as counting cash in your wallet takes. For a group of people sitting in a restaurant, PayPal was (is? I dunno) annoying. Venmo is effortless.

I just looked up Square Cash, and it seems like it launched in 2015 according to Wikipedia. Everyone I know (who I would want to send money to/from) was already using Venmo by 2012, 2013 at the latest. I've yet to encounter a single instance where I wanted to switch, nor (anecdotally) have I heard someone voice a single complaint about Venmo in-person.

Venmo got to market with a pretty much pure product before anyone else, and has yet to give any cause for switching.

Wikipedia's article is very oddly worded, saying

"In March 2015, Square introduced Square Cash for businesses, which includes the ability for individuals, organizations, and business owners to use a unique username to send and receive money, known as a $cashtag"

But for some reason they neglect to point out the pre-for-business component. It actually dates back to 2013:

https://squareup.com/news/introducing-cashtags

I stand corrected, though, because as you note, Venmo predates it by several years. I guess I just had no reason to switch from PayPal until Square Cash came along in 2013 and was even more frictionless. But ultimately, these things are clearly down to network effect.

Oddly, all I can find about the PayPal mobile app is that it was "re-designed" in 2013. Of course, I was using PayPal on a Palm handheld back in ~2000....

The thing with PayPal is that it always seemed primarily targeted towards customer-business interactions. Trivial payments between friends didn't seem like a high-priority usecase back in ~2012. I noticed the same issues as you when I tried to Google its mobile history.

Venmo definitely won the first-to-market/network effect game. That said, I'm not complaining. Unless it looks like they are on course for bankruptcy or there is a major data leak, it's CX is pretty much exactly what I want it to be. The only unnecessary part is the social feed, but that has absolutely no impact on me unless I want it to (and sometimes it's amusing to see the messages my friends attach to them if I happen to look at it).

Could be. I used PayPal to transfer money to friends before it was even accepted on eBay, but obviously that's a pretty niche example.

It looks like Venmo is ~2x as popular as Square Cash from this recode article:

https://www.recode.net/2018/2/27/17059182/square-cash-app-mo...

And a few other good data points/comparisons.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/paypal-vs-google-wallet...

https://lifehacker.com/money-transfer-showdown-square-cash-v...

(One source points out that Square Cash followed Square Wallet and Square Order; I used Square Wallet because I also had their card-reader from back in the day, so this goes back to at least 2011).

> it's a public way to expose your social graph a bit.

Why is this a thing?

Bragging? "Look at me, I'm baller, spending money on my friends!"

so they can say it's public data and sell the ish out of it

Why not? It seems to be a pretty popular feature -- lots of people post things to be funny and/or brag about their lives. Most of social media exists for people to broadcast their experiences.

Technically, that the thing with Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies

something something bitcoin

It's not hard to understand. My feed is mostly "friends only" but there are a few public posts too, let's have a look:

https://venmo.com/harryh

    1. Tickets for a band. That's cool.
    2. Clearly something amusing about jail.
    3. A computer. Computers are fun.
    4. MEAT
    5. Sci Fi movies. Movies are fun.

People do this for the same reason they use twitter or facebook or instagram. To share what they are doing in their life with their friends. Most payments aren't top secret stuff, they're just little notes about people's social life.

Every time I encounter venmo whoever has it usually apologizes for it and explains that you can turn the weird social stuff off. If that's the case, then what's the point? Moreover, it demonstrates that the people who made it have weird philosophies on things. What other choices have they made that I don't know of, can't turn off and would disagree with?

Square Cash is great, btw. No bloat, very simple, does what you expect it to. (I suppose PayPal is looking that way now these days too though)

Square Cash may have less bloat and a far nicer UI, but it charges a percentage for instant deposit, while Venmo has a flat $0.25 fee. So when you don't want to wait three days to get the money to your bank account, you grit your teeth and use Venmo.

IIRC you can in Venmo say that its private and thus turn off the weird social thing per payment:

https://imgur.com/She6BGE

You can also change the default, although that seems to be an option I don't remember having when I first started using the app...

That is located in Settings -> Privacy... although you get a popup saying "You know you can change this per payment, you sure you want to do this" which to me feels weird and pushy.

I agree with Square Cash or other services, instead of Venmo since the whole idea of by default sharing my payments feels weird. Apple Pay works really well too if you and the recipient are both Apple users.

In this thread - "You can do X to make it private."

In my view, that is not addressing the main issue with Venmo. Socializing financial transactions shouldn't have taken off from back of the napkin stage. It is simply unbelievable on 2 fronts: 1) Such an app exists and is doing fine 2) People simply do not care about their privacy.

I am utterly speechless.

Who in the right mind opens up Venmo to just browse what kind of transactions are being made amongst their friends? What kind of social engagement is this? How did the creators of Venmo pitched this idea to investors? So many questions.

Its the world we have made. We make a whole generation of people not care for privacy (FB), and then we are surprised when people assume their finances are not private?

We are all collectively to blame for such privacy failures. The users/victims are simply that, victims of our troubled privacy-less future.

"hook them while they're young". With FB/Snap/(whatever teenagers are using these days as closing upon 50 i seem to just don't know :) being probably the gateway drugs.

I use Venmo and immediately set my preferences to private. Admittedly though, I will browse through the public transactions of my friends out of interest in what they are up to.

Venmo solved the pain points of easily transferring money between acquaintances regardless of the financial institutions that money may reside in. Having social interaction in their app is a side affect or the purpose, not the purpose itself.

> Some users seem to forget that their transactions are public by default, and their payment activity provides an unfiltered paper trail of what’s really happening in their lives.

This is it in a nutshell - nobody pays attention to privacy settings, and they don't think about the consequences of the fact that they can see other people payments scroll by on their screens.

I agree. I think there may be social pressure (implied, inherent, made-up) or laziness or unawareness that perpetuates this. You can make private the default setting. The idea of broadcasting your finances only makes sense for social messaging/indicating.

There are so many comments here from people not understanding why anybody would ever want their history to be public, or shocked that that's the default...

Here's the thing: you get to type whatever you want, so you turn everything into jokes. Because it's public, you get to make up things that will embarrass your friend. Cryptic emoji. It's fun. It's just silly. When you pay back friends at a bar, you can browse their history and make fun of them.

None of the other payment platforms are fun like that!

Well, you can't have too much fun. If you put something like "ISIS recruitment dues", you can get the money frozen.

Financial transactions are covered by a lot of complex laws and regulations. A bad joke may end up costing a lot of time and money to clear your name.

It is equivalent to prank calling cops and telling them that a friend sexually assaulted you.

Usually, stupid financial transactions bite you at the most inopportune times like when you apply for home mortgages or deal with immigration issues.

Drawing a comparison between a comment sent to a friend (a communication between two parties that ostensibly know each other) and prank calling the cops is a bit far fetched.

You are not wrong, but anytime you involve a third party in your transaction, especially when it comes to money, they take responsibility for that transfer, and ensuring it complies with all relevant laws.

Cash is still king.

I get that and put jokes in the memos sometimes, but I still have my history set to private. I just don't want the complexity of deciding what should be public or private when any potential gain is so small.

When I'm just trying to settle a bar tab or pay for my share of a work lunch, I don't want to think about whether a joke I make or a new acquaintance makes is going to be hurtful to somebody else who might send me money later.

I don't want to have to think about whether the fact that I got a meal with somebody and didn't invite a third person is going to cause me personal or professional strife. I don't even necessarily want to advertise that I'm briefly in a particular city if I didn't tell all my contacts there I'd be in town.

It takes a few clicks to make everything private. Either way, I deleted my account last week because Venmo is killing their website and forcing Android/iOS only.

I'm not even sure why Venmo caught on, it is the worst option out of all the possible payment systems (fb, Google pay, sq cash...) since they don't deposit cash received into your bank account and rather hold it interest free.

Imo purely user experience and maybe first mover / network effects. I know it's the worst option yet it continues to be the go-to option because it's the most likely service that random friend A or B will have.

This!! Why why why do people even like Venmo? It is such a bad product and the basic premise of social payments is just totally nuts.

I’ll tell you one reason why, and maybe your curiosity will lead you down further rabbit holes.

I use Venmo exclusively for sending money to girls from Tinder. If you look at my stream, you’ll see transactions sending money to tons of babes, often with suggestive comments. Other girls sometimes see this, and decide they too want in on the action.

Pretty great what giving out some dollars on the internet can do for your rep. For a developer making six figures in Silicon Valley, it should be no big deal at all.

That's brilliant

Do you mean sending money to prostitutes? I try to avoid those on Tinder.

No, I mean sending money to women.

I'm confused about the distinction. You send women money you are hooking up with, you advertise to other women that if they hook up with you, you will also send them money. Very fine line you are drawing. Not judging, good for you!

I don’t hook up with most of them.

So you are a sugar daddy...

A few clicks sounds like at least a few clicks - 1 too many.

Agreed, I simply believe it's still our responsibility to maintain the privacy settings if we disagree with the terrible defaults

I was one of the early adopters of Venmo. Here's my take on it:

* Venmo launched the first out of all the systems you mentioned

* Venmo was one of the few (maybe only) system that allows you to pay users who are not on their system. Say you need to pay Joe and you were a Venmo user but Joe wasn't. You could still "pay" them on venmo and they would get a text back saying if they signed up they would get the payment. No one else did this well when they launched

* Venmo integrated with facebook so many of the people I needed to pay were already in the system

* Venmo was the first free system to use

* Venmo was the first mobile friendly system to use. It was the first major system where I could split the bill real time at a restaurant

* Venmo paid early adopters to join (I think I received $2 to make my first payment)

It seems like a clear case of first mover advantage. I'm sure the systems you mentioned are now better, but at the time Venmo had the best UX and now that everyone I need to pay is on it, why would I switch? The few cents of interest loss I lose every year isn't worth finding out if everyone I need to pay is on one of the alternative systems.

That makes sense, there really wasn't a good system beforehand for paying others.

My primary concern with Venmo holding the cash is that I'd much rather have my bank in charge of it than some other random entity - The fact that it's now Paypal-owned doesn't help either

PayPal was doing most of this years ago - and keeping your transactions private...

PayPal didn't have a decent mobile app and it charged for all card transactions (credit or debit).

If i'm sitting in a restaurant with friends, I'm not going to ask each of them for their email/paypal IDs so I can charge them when you can already get that info in venmo.

Paypal was missing all the core features:

* Paypal did not integrate with facebook (does it even do that now?) so I would have to manually ask each person for their paypal id. Not fun for casual dinners with new friends

* Paypal was not free (they charged for debit or credit)

* Paypal did not have a good mobile UX

I remember this because the reason I adopted Venmo was because my roommates were searching for a solution to split rent and we looked at Paypal and ended up choosing Venmo. Then I started using it for social activities (restaurants, taxis, bars, etc.) and became an active user. I actually have had Paypal since the ebay days, but I never use it.

I tried Venmo and it has what I consider a fatal bug: it doesn’t work with joint bank accounts. So if my wife has the app and transfers her Venmo balance to our account, I can’t also do that with my Venmo balance. They tell me to first transfer to her account then to the bank, which is...well, pretty hacky. You’d think they would be able to fix that one.

> Venmo was one of the few (maybe only) system that allows you to pay users who are not on their system. Say you need to pay Joe and you were a Venmo user but Joe wasn't. You could still "pay" them on venmo and they would get a text back saying if they signed up they would get the payment.

If someone "paid" me this way, there would be issues.

What a lot of people miss about the utility of Venmo is that it lowers the social cost of squaring up minor debts.

Think of the example of a large group of friends often gathers in arbitrary subsets of the group to go to dinner. If Alice orders salad every time and Bob orders steak, and we split it down the middle each time, that kind of sucks for Alice. Some people suggest rotating picking up the entire bill between outings, but I'm unconvinced that this really ends up working out equitably in practice.

Or, say Dora has a habit of leaving happy hour after the first round, which was picked up by Charlie. It's not a huge cost, but...

In a world without instant electronic payment, the meek Alices and Charlies of the world lose out because there's a social cost to asking somebody to repay a small debt (paying <$10 by cash is a hassle). By making these frictionless, I'd argue that Venmo reduces that cost by providing an easy way to equitably split without levying the inconvenience on the restaurant, as with separate checks.

Guys, people aren't "exposing their finances" on Venmo. People don't use it to buy stuff, or pay off CC bills, or anything. Nor are the transaction amounts exposed.

It's used for balancing payments/debts between individuals. I don't consider "A paid B for brunch yesterday" or "X paid Y for Rent+cable" in any way to be "exposing finances". It's just another random (albeit unnecessary) social network, one that takes literally no effort to use or disable.

Shocking, young people don't care if others know that they went out to dinner with some friends. It's amazing to me that this level of exposure seems "nuts" to you all and leaves you "speechless". Like, how paranoid and antisocial are you all? Who cares about this stuff? Or is this all just some crazy slippery-slope thing going on in your heads?

Thank you... also I'm not sure people realize that you type the description of the transaction, it's not coming from a credit card or something, so you can be as specific/vague/nonsensical/misleading as you want...

It's amazing to me that this level of exposure seems "nuts" to you all and leaves you "speechless".

I'm old. I'm very painfully aware that other people often feel amazingly entitled to have some say in how I spend my life. I have spent a lot of decades arranging a life in which, no, not too many people have any say whatsoever.

It's possible that the youth of today are experiencing an unprecedented amount of (social) freedom that their cranky elders lack. If so, good for you.

It's also possible that you just haven't yet figured out that information is power, hell is other people and there are lots of crazies in the world who feel incredibly entitled to try to enforce some standard of behavior on you that you won't notice until you try to do something they don't like for some reason, no matter how innocuous.

What experience do you "cranky elders" have that makes this seem dangerous? What possible malicious intent can be applied to the knowledge that someone shares rent with their roommate, or the occasional bar tab settlement? There aren't even dollar amounts attached, and usually just cryptic emoji messages.

Just saying "Information is power" makes it sound like there's been no thought put into the objection at all, I've not seen a single concrete explanation as to how this level of data collection is or could be dangerous. It seems like cowardly hiding behind a blanket principle because of paranoia about anything that can possibly be related to "privacy".

>I'm very painfully aware that other people often feel amazingly entitled to have some say in how I spend my life. I have spent a lot of decades arranging a life in which, no, not too many people have any say whatsoever.

I have absolutely no clue how this has anything to do with Venmo whatsoever.

> Shocking, young people don't care if others know that they went out to dinner with some friends

But, it seems like they do care. They want others to know they went for dinner with friends, or settled a bill for brunch. It seems like they're obsessed with finding ways to extract the most social presence from normal everyday activities.

It's enabled by default. It isn't an "obsession", it was something the company threw in there and that users don't care enough about to disable. I'm sure usage of it would vanish almost instantly if something like the actual $ amount was published in addition to the message.

These comments are crazy to me. There is legit nothing of value on the Venmo social feed. Just people giving roommates money for rent/cable/bills or friends settling up small debts with emojis that don’t mean anything anyways. No one my age (mid 20s) Ives a shit about who knows that stuff

As someone who uses Venmo regularly and with friends who all have accounts they use regularly, to summarize many of the points below:

1. No one asked for this. This is Paypal trying to make a payments app social and people staying for the payments app despite the social feed.

2. So long as you can change the defaults, no one cares about if the company has sane default settings etc. Millenials / Gen Z care about privacy and most of my friends default to private. A company's defaults is not reflective of the privacy concerns of users because they know they have the better product.

3. Venmo messages are often jokes and payment amounts aren't shown even when public/friends

https://qz.com/359903/the-emoji-of-venmo/

4. Square just didn't catch on and Venmo's integration with other apps makes it locked in (Splitwise and Tab to name two main ones. My friends refer to Venmo and those two as the payments holy trinity)

5. This article is crap and no one I know looks at the feed. If you're dumb enough to cheat and use a public Venmo payment, wow. When I hit it on the splash page I see payments from a few people, nothing more interesting than pizza, rent, or utilities. Incredible, I know people have basic functions! The privacy invasion!

6. Most people I know transfer to their bank immediately. The intermediary step is a pain but far less than using any other payment service. I'll get over not earning my .03% interest at my bank and letting Venmo skim the interest on their end to keep the service free. Yes customer service is crap and so is Paypal generally but the reality is that it removes far more pain in life than it creates.

> 1. No one asked for this. This is Paypal trying to make a payments app social and people staying for the payments app despite the social feed.

PayPal acquired Venmo through their acquisition of Braintree.

I'm aware - is there a contradiction above? I didn't mean to imply this is new.

Cash App (by Square) cares more about your privacy, has more perks, and is IMO from a much better company than PayPal.

https://cash.app/

They also are doing a lot more. Cash App issues a debit card and allows ATM withdrawals and direct deposit. In effect, they've become a pop-up bank to the under-banked.

Square Cash is every bit as bad as PayPal during their early "paypalsucks" days, complete with opaque "security" policies and unreachable support.

I have had multiple Cash accounts (one business, a couple personal) which have been stuck in limbo for more than a year. At some point, a transaction must have flagged me because Square reverted all of my recent transactions, locked my funds, and won't process any incoming or outgoing transactions on ANY of my accounts.

I've contacted support over and over through their tool, and I have gotten ZERO response. Not even a formulaic "you're off the platform" email. There's no phone support for Square Cash, so outside of my emails going into a black hole, there is no way to get a human to review any of it.

I have given up. If the filing fee for a small claims case wasn't higher than the cash I still had left in there, I would have sued them long ago. They are every bit as shady and uncommunicative as PayPal and I would never trust them with my money again.

I'm going to call out AirBnB on this one too. You end up seeing the activities of anyone who has ever tagged you as being part of a trip, even if you haven't signed up for the platform. Worse, you cannot make any part of your AirBnB history private. I'm also not aware if there's a way to separate business from personal accounts other than to sign up twice. I suppose eBay was historically similar, but even with eBay there wasn't this social connectedness aspect that you couldn't quite escape.

I understand the review aspect.

It's really strange to not have the option of privacy.

Something about this reads like a viral ad for Venmo. It's as if it is trying to draw you in to the app to see what your friends are doing.

If it is, its a damn good one!

Add me to the list of people who were horrified to see a social feed when I signed up for Venmo. Ain't no way I'm ever going to use it. Though I suppose it would be interesting to see what other people are paying for/getting paid for. Perhaps I know some drug dealers or "professional girlfriends", etc.

You may be disappointed. Drug dealers and professional girlfriends are likely still uninterested in paper trails and paying taxes on income.

You say that as if there aren't thousands of examples out there.

You have thousands of drug dealers and prostitutes in your feed?!

In use Venmo to pay my babysitter. By default when you open the app, it shows the social feed.

It’s true, I learn new things about my friends every time I open the app. Sometimes some fairly embarrassing things.

Despite the fact that we have a babysitter isn’t private, I still always keep the transaction private.

Who would use Venmo? When I see people buying drugs (see vicemo.com), I shake my head at the stupidity of it all.

I have been asked multiple times by people who want to pay me, and I have flatted refused because of there approach to financial privacy. I try to get them to stop using it also, for their own privacy. Lucky we have other options -- I usually get them into cryptocurrency instead. Hey -- its also open by default, but at least its hard to correlate an address to a person.

I'd assume 99% of these are jokes.

True, but its a shame the authorities have no sense of humor.

99% of those "people buying drugs" aren't buying drugs. It reports anything with "drink", "speed", "grass", or "dope", and obvious jokes.

Right, but its just so stupid! People think they are being clever or funny. Its as clever as going into a police station and admitting your crimes. Cool joke!

So by default it doesn't say how much you pay or what for... is it supposed to be kinda weirdly mysterious?

Also it's kinda funny how money is being used to track cheating here. Outside splitting a bill (we just split it then and there) ... I can't imagine any transactions were tied directly to my SO as in handing over money... maybe that is a generational thing.

People who like the social feature of venmo: Can you explain why you enjoy monitoring financial transactions between your friends? I'm genuinely perplexed. Is this just a new norm that's emerging in our culture? In my circle of friends, this behavior would be, at least, uninteresting, and at most, intrusive.

Sounds like snooping feature.

Venmo should accept the rejection of a payment.

Someone can publicly send you a payment with any arbitrary message and there is NO way for you to avoid it other than to send the money back.

Venmo is evil. They have this whole concept of socializing how we spend money. They're onboarding merchants like they're going to replace credit cards. I don't want my money in a "Venmo account." I want it in my bank account. I don't need all my friends knowing who I'm paying back, and for what.

The only time I've used it in the past year is when a guy at a gas station asked to borrow $20 to fill his tank and he paid me back with Venmo. I was worried it was a scam, but it worked out okay.

Cash is still king.

The whole feed just makes no sense. I will never care if person X just paid person Y, even if I know them and certainly if I don’t.

Is there a simple way to turn off the "feed" function?

Come from a country where people don't use Venmo, and was astounded to read:

> Some users seem to forget that their transactions are public by default

Well that's (expletive). Secure defaults anyone?

While it is weird, it's worth noting that the transaction information it shows just shows who paid who and an optional narrative. They don't show actual dollar amounts. That being said, you can always post privately. Not sure why people post publicly.

It's still insane to make that public by default.

Was going to reply but you've basically said it. You could pay an ex-partner when you're not supposed to be seing them, a liquor store when you're supposed to be sober, or a sex worker when you're supposed to be ashamed. Not showing dollar amounts doesn't make this sane.

Sane defaults, rather.

It is annoying how stuff on Facebook is by default shared with "Public", how applications install malware/adware by default, any advertising-related opt-out.

Only positive thing I can say is "they're not the only ones". But that doesn't make it right (Whataboutism).

Sad truth is, the software developers or the companies hiring them get away with such immoral choices.

>It is annoying how stuff on Facebook is by default shared with "Public",

It does? Mine currently defaults to "friends", and I'm pretty sure the default is just "whatever your last choice was" -- if I set my last one to public, then next time the default value is public.

Yes, that's the default when you start (which is bad).

The default is furthermore like you said "whatever your last choice was". Which is bloody annoying. As if some terribly dumb AI is trying to understand what my motive is. If I always post for X, and then make an exception, then I don't want that exception again next time. Why would I? So if I always post "for friends", for example, and then one time I post "for family" then I don't want next time only "for family" but I want it to be what my default is: "for friends". Because my behavior is like that. At the very least I could receive some kind of feedback in the form of a confirmation (because it sees I'm deviating from my normal behavior). Its like if I go to the bakery and always buy hazelnut meringue but then one time I buy a cherry pie cause of some special occasion. I don't want them to assume that next week I'll again take a cherry pie. I want them to be like "oh its that fellow who basically always has hazelnut meringue". Sure, if I'm starting to buy cherry pies regularly it is a different story. But my usage pattern on posts on Facebook was pretty damn clear: 90-99% for friends, rest for family.

Although, yeah, it usually bit me when I mistakenly posted on "friends" instead of "family" which the above example doesn't cover. Though I thankfully didn't use Facebook that much and not that I personally care specifically about Facebook anymore; I removed everything from my Facebook except my friend list, and I won't use it much anymore. I'm also really not sure if I'm alone on this issue or if people are generally annoyed by this behavior. I assumed the latter but your post suggests otherwise.

I think you're being too hard on FB for that. It's pretty common for UIs to be "sticky" in that sense, because, as a (pre-AI-hype) heuristic, it's generally accurate. If anything, the AI-driven UI is the one that would realize you probably don't want the cherry pie again.

Sticky just feels oddly underoptimized for such an AI-based platform. But lets imagine a different situation. Imagine this was a BB and I was an admin, and I was suddenly switching from the admin forum to a non-admin forum. I'd certainly wanna get that very clear to me, right? Perhaps not the best example though.

Even if decision-based AI is not preferable they could also just after such a deviation instead of assuming one or the other use it to ask me. Like a heads up.

> The default is furthermore like you said "whatever your last choice was". Which is bloody annoying. As if some terribly dumb AI is trying to understand what my motive is. If I always post for X, and then make an exception, then I don't want that exception again next time.

I'm not sure I agree - if I change a setting, I want it to _stay_ changed (and if it's a one-time change, it's easy enough to change back). Imagine approaching it from the other angle - it's easy to see the headlines "Facebook trying to revert your privacy settings" (especially I imagine more people will be making changes to be more restrictive--from whatever Facebook's defaults are to what they are comfortable with).

> I'm not sure I agree - if I change a setting, I want it to _stay_ changed (and if it's a one-time change, it's easy enough to change back).

Me [generally] too, but I don't post often, so say my last post was to family only, and then a week later I post and I don't check the setting.

> it's easy to see the headlines "Facebook trying to revert your privacy settings"

Fair enough, thanks for that angle. How about some feedback right after you selected that, that it became default, and that you can revert it? Or is my use-case really that specific? I don't know.

Wow. Why the hell would anyone use Venmo?

It is a cultural/generational thing. Millenials don't think twice about this. They are shocked that anyone would care. Non-millennials are shocked that anyone would share their financials publicly. We're all shocked at each other's behavior.

Excuse me... but as a millennial, and knowing many other millennials that also care, we do absolutely care.

There is a long list of people that I know that don't use Venmo because of the "social" crap. Please don't try to brush this as a "millennials don't care".

Is it necessary to take offense at every general statement? If millennials are the primary users of this product, then what he says is true. It's really tedious to have to couch every general statement in terms that allow for exceptions.

>Excuse me... but as a millennial, and knowing many other millennials that also care, we do absolutely care.

I think by Millenials he really meant to say Gen Z.

"Millenials" has become a catch-all term for "young people" over the past 10 years, but the reality is that we are no longer the youngest generation. Older folks just haven't caught up to that fact yet. Anyone below age 25 now is a completely different generation from us. "Getting" Snapchat and Venmo seems to be the dividing line.

This page was immediately taken over by the ad redirects for free iPhones and crap. Can we get this replaced with a not shady source?

Nothing in the article about "cheating spouses."

> But Venmo users have found it’s also an extremely effective tool for keeping tabs on friends, partners and exes, researching crushes, and in some cases, uncovering infidelity.

That line and the article title are unsubstantiated. The three interviews are with two young college students and one 28 year-old guy whose ex-BF has a coke problem. Unless I missed it, there's nothing in the article about a cheating spouse.

It's just HN's daily 2minutes clickbait.

“Not that I care,” she said. “It’s just interesting to see.”

This feature is completely nuts. Completely. I can't believe people want any of their payment activity showing up in a public feed. Just, no.

Not defending this, but I think the default setting is "Friends". So it's semi-public. But people are generically paying friends back for meals. You can understand why a lot of people wouldn't think of this as a big deal.

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Venmo is owned by PayPal therefore it is garbage and should be avoided.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Holy shit, I didn’t realize this is how Venmo works.

I was just thinking last week that I should open an account for sending money to friends to settle small balances... but now I don’t want anything to do with the service.

I am embarrassed (yet again) to admit I am part of the Millennial generation. My generation has effectively destroyed every aspect of both privacy and human interaction. It's truly pathetic.

This article has an interesting (and strange) take on the issue, mostly, though with some reservations, characterizing the lack of privacy as something empowering. I liked the anecdotes about people digitally stalking their partners and friends.

I guess you can make that argument if you believe that some aspects a post-privacy world is something positive, but it is still strange to read.

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